At the Heart of Virginia Commonwealth's Stunning Basketball Success Is a Brutal Commitment to Fitness

Virginia Commonwealth, a David slinging at a world of Goliaths, was a nobody in college basketball until a few years ago.

But here is one reason why VCU now beats the sport's big boys: The way the Rams train makes other elite athletes look like schlubs on the recumbent bike.

In preparation for the still-nascent college-basketball season, VCU endured an off-season workout regimen that was as exhausting as it was extreme. The players turned tires, tossed kegs and used a parking deck near their home court as a treadmill. They lugged 60-pound bags not far from the site where Patrick Henry demanded either liberty or death.

VCU Athletics

They turned an August tour of Rome into their version of "The Amazing Race," complete with sprints up the Spanish Steps. In Lake Como, the glitzy Italian town where George Clooney owns a villa, they somehow managed to find a ropes course.

After returning home, VCU coach Shaka Smart even had an ex-Navy SEAL put the team—coaches included—through a five-day September boot camp listed on the team's calendar as Hell Week. The military-style sessions included games of tug of war, swims in the James River and plunges through a raft filled with ice water.

Granted, grueling workouts and military influences aren't new to college sports. What makes VCU's conditioning remarkable is how wildly effective it is.

Smart's strategy at VCU, called "havoc," is the general practice of making the other team miserable. In basketball terms, havoc means a full-court press, suffocating half-court defense and a frenetic style. All of this requires VCU to be in better shape than its opponent.

It works wonders: In 2011, 11th-seeded VCU tied the record for the lowest seed ever to reach the NCAA tournament's Final Four, and the Rams led the country last season in turnover percentage and steal percentage, according to kenpom.com.

Since Smart's hiring in 2009, the Rams have knocked off college-basketball blue bloods such as Kansas, UCLA and Georgetown, and they will have more chances this week in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in the Bahamas. On Thursday there, the Rams upset 19th-ranked Memphis, 78-65.

"The way we play is fast, intense and aggressive," Smart said. "So everything that we're doing from a training standpoint, we want to be fast, intensive and aggressive."

Smart's top lieutenant in this matter is Daniel Roose, VCU's strength and conditioning coach, who recently compared his workout philosophy to the Siberian training montage from "Rocky IV." In fact, when VCU plays in Philadelphia, its freshmen climb the Museum of Art steps that Sylvester Stallone made famous.

"I just want our kids training like a pack of wild dogs," Roose said last month while wearing a "Wild Dog" T-shirt and camouflage cargo shorts.

VCU's fitness strategy is unconventional in almost every way. Smart doesn't just tolerate games of full-court one-on-one but encourages them. Roose doesn't exactly champion bench-pressing. "If they're on their backs," he said, "they better be taking a charge."

Roose also reserved Fridays in the summer for "Road Games," in which VCU's players did untraditional workouts in unfamiliar settings.

During their Italy trip, when the Rams beat four opponents by an average margin of 55 points, off days were more taxing than games. Their idle time in Rome resulted in a two-hour sprint around the city's tourist attractions. "I felt like I was on a TV show," Rams guard Rob Brandenberg said.

A stop in the vacation destination Lake Como yielded a visit to an improbably located ropes course with views that would make Clooney drool. The challenge there was mostly mental for guard Darius Theus. "I'm not a big heights guy," he said.

But the cornerstone of VCU's off-season was its predawn time with John McGuire, a former Navy SEAL who founded SEAL Team Physical Training, an outdoor fitness program here.

"The killer instinct—I basically sharpen that," McGuire said. "We teach them to be comfortable being uncomfortable."

McGuire put VCU through the ringer for three days last year. This year, he said, VCU's coaches asked him to "up the ante."

Over five early mornings, VCU's players, staff members and some active-duty Navy SEALs hauled sand bags, rowed in life preservers, dragged each other in sleds, lifted logs 150 times above their heads, carried boats with one hand and oars in the other, hoisted each other in darkness and yelled "Hooyah!" a lot.

For the last day of Hell Week, McGuire saved something known as the Ice Boat. It was just that: a boat with ice. The players dived in, ducked underneath three floating obstacles, gasped for air and then climbed out, all in the time it takes to read this sentence.

Alongside them was Smart, 35, who has a history of immersion coaching. At a public practice before the 2011 Final Four, he delighted the crowd by taking a charge and diving for a loose ball.

The VCU players insist that Smart was no match for them during the strength parts of SEAL training. "We took the cake on that one," said 7-foot center D.J. Haley. And yet Smart was still spry in endurance exercises, often leading the pack of runners. "Try to catch Shaka!" an instructor yelled once at the crab-walking college kids. And in the dreaded Ice Boat, the coach even found a way to one-up his players.

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